By Andrew Rothstein (Managing Director, BlackRock) Andrew will talk about how the Financial Modeling Group at BlackRock leverages Apache Spark to explore and better understand the financial and economic behaviors of debtors through data. Several use-cases will highlight how we apply Spark and D3 to visualize a large loan-level mortgage dataset; extract distributions and cluster boundaries with K-Means; and ultimately draw meaningful insights into the composition and corresponding discriminant attributes of borrower groups. We will showcase software components built and employed to streamline the running of big data Spark analyses.