The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Advan Research Corporation, trading as Advan, is a New York based alternative data provider that converts anonymised mobile device location signals and card transaction records into location intelligence products for institutional investors, commercial real estate professionals and retailers. Its pipeline draws on tens of millions of opt in mobile devices in the United States and internationally, maps visits against a library the firm describes as more than 9 million points of interest across roughly 150 million buildings, and pairs that foot traffic with billions of processed credit and debit card transactions to estimate visitation, sales performance and consumer spend by brand, store and sector. The company sells this as a set of named products rather than one bundle: FIT (Foot Traffic Intelligence Platform) and Patterns+ for visitation analytics, the latter built on the Weekly, Monthly and Neighborhood Patterns methodology it acquired from SafeGraph in November 2022; SPENDVIEW for card linked spend signals; REVEAL for property level location intelligence; REPerspectives for migration and demographic trend data; and REI (Real Estate Intelligence) for retail trade area, void analysis and site selection, acquired from RetailStat in November 2024. Data is delivered as raw feeds, through a hosted dashboard, or as custom research, and the firm markets ticker level coverage of several thousand publicly traded companies and brands. Its own materials describe hedge funds and discretionary asset managers as its principal customer base, alongside REITs, commercial real estate firms and corporate retail and supply chain teams; Advan states its mobile data is sourced only from apps where users have explicitly opted in and that it does not use bidstream data, positioning consent as the basis of its CCPA and GDPR compliance rather than a bolt on policy. Advan was founded in 2015 by Yiannis Tsiounis, who previously founded fixed income data firm BQuotes, later acquired by Moody's. Tsiounis now serves as Advan's Executive Chairman, with Grigorios Reppas, formerly Global Head of Hedge Fund Sales at MarketAxess, as Chief Executive Officer. The company is headquartered at 299 Broadway in lower Manhattan and grew through acquisition, buying SafeGraph's Patterns foot traffic business in 2022 after SafeGraph exited that market, and RetailStat's Real Estate Intelligence unit in 2024. It won Best Alternative Data Provider at the Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards in 2020, a citation that credited its practice of having staff manually draw and twice verify the perimeter of each mapped location rather than relying on automated geofencing alone. Client logos published on its site include Accenture, Apple, Chick-fil-A, Conde Nast, Douglas Elliman and Keller Williams.
