Bank of America’s Matthew McQueen On Fixed-Income Lending

It’s not easy being McQueen. 

Matthew McQueen is a leader within one of the world’s foremost financial institutions. 

In November, the Bank of America managing director became its global head of fixed-income currencies and commodities micro products, including securitized mortgages and credit. The big jump is par for the course in his career.

McQueen started out at the now-defunct Bear Stearns in 2003, moved on to Merrill Lynch, was there when Bank of America acquired that firm, and was part of the team behind the historic $3.5 billion commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) deal in late 2024 to refinance Rockefeller Center.

Commercial Observer caught up with McQueen last week while he was traveling in Paris to learn more about how this epic refinancing came together, and his career as a whole. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: Let’s start with the question on everyone’s mind. You’re in Paris right now — where is the best place to eat?

Matthew McQueen: I went to Le Grand Café, and it was fantastic! 

What does life outside of work look like?

I try to spend as much time with my family as possible. I also enjoy skiing. I’m a fairly avid skier, which I get to do more of now that my kids are older and have gotten into it. I spend a lot of time reading. I really enjoy reading about history — ancient history, U.S. history and world history.

Can you walk us through your career and how you landed at Bank of America?

Today I run all of the micro businesses within fixed income for Bank of America. That is, mortgages and securitized products, municipal banking and markets, and all of global credit. And within global mortgages and securitized products is our real estate structured finance business, which is predominantly the commercial mortgage-backed securities business. Also, we have our real estate commercial banking business, which is part of that, and that’s our institutional real estate business.

I started at Bear Stearns back in 2003 in counterparty credit risk, largely covering hedge funds. A lot of them were mortgage-backed securities-oriented funds. I subsequently had a couple different roles at Bear. I moved from risk to research briefly, and then on to the trading desk, where I traded mortgage-backed securities, largely subordinate non-agency credit securities. 

I did that until Bear Stearns was bought by J.P. Morgan. I was at J.P. Morgan and left in the summer of 2008 to join Merrill Lynch, and then they announced they were being bought by Bank of America. So I had the unique distinction of having four business cards in one year. 

What was the biggest lesson you learned in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis?

I was much younger going into the financial crisis, and as a junior trader you come in and you have your sector to trade, your product to focus on, and your tasks for the day. So you don’t necessarily have as much free time to be as intellectually curious as you might like. 

I don’t think anyone anticipated the financial crisis. Otherwise it wouldn’t have played out the way that it did. It did make me think — every now and then — about how you have to step out of what you are doing day to day and look at things through a different lens. And that is just a life lesson. 

It definitely oriented my perspective on risk and reward. Having gone through the financial crisis trading mortgage-backed securities that were previously thought to be AAA, and seeing what the price drawdown could be, and what the loss expectations were, it does give you a perspective that things you thought were not possible, or things that you always assumed were sort of there forever, weren’t. 

The idea that investment-grade financial institutions could not go out of business was something that I think people just took as a given. Or the idea that AAA securities could lose 50 percent of their principal value. So, I think you always have to start with this humility that anything can happen.

Talk to us about the record $3.5 billion CMBS loan for Rockefeller Center.

This is a landmark property that is known to everyone, it’s very famous. And Tishman Speyer, its owner, is a long-term client of the firm. The team here had been talking with them for quite some time about the refinancing of the property.

With a property that large, you have line of sight into when the existing loan is maturing, so it didn’t sneak up on them, or us. This is something that we had been having conversations with them about for many, many months — if not years — in advance. 

We spent a lot of time working with Tishman Speyer, not only on how we would structure the transaction, but also how we would position the transaction from a marketing perspective, how we would go about marketing it, pre-marketing, et cetera. 

This is a landmark property that has a phenomenal story, but was also going to enter a market that had been pretty fatigued from office lending during the prior year and a half coming into it. We were confident that if there was a property and a story to, you know, bring to the market, despite the headwinds that we had seen in the office market, that this was a great candidate for a wide variety of reasons. 

What challenges pop up when doing a deal like this?

This is an iterative process when we’re talking about how we would do a transaction like this, especially with the market backdrop. 

There’s structure, there’s marketing and everything in between. Obviously, there’s risk retention considerations, too. So you’re kind of thinking through all of these things, and preparing to maybe utilize the balance sheet in certain situations. 

What we were really focused on was that we had a phenomenal distribution, because our securitized products franchise is global, and we are well ranked in every product. We have a really strong client base of people that we can bring these transactions to. And, so, a big part of it was having relationships with key investors that were going to come in to support the deal in the early days and give confidence that this was a transaction that worked. Having those investor relationships was really important because, once we started getting a handful of anchor investors, it just started to compound from there.

Obviously, the previous year and a half had certainly been very tough on the office market. There were losses in the bank market, and some challenged CMBS deals. We certainly had a lot of clients that, from an exposure perspective, just did not want to be in office. 

I think once people saw the leadership that our investors were providing in this transaction, it signaled that not all office properties are created equal — that there is tiering in this space, and for a good asset with a great sponsor and a great tenant roster, that it’s OK to come into the market.

Is this something that you’ll look back on as a career win?

It’s not about me in any way, shape or form. I do look at it as a great win for the team, and a testament to a number of people’s very hard work. It is reflective of the team effort of this franchise. This certainly is a transaction that I certainly am proud to be associated with, but I really have to give the credit to the team.

How have investors responded to this record CMBS deal from the perspective of high-quality Class A office properties?

I would say that the CMBS market for single-asset, single-borrower — or, in this case, single-asset Class A office properties — is fully open, with very strong investor demand, and that continues to be the case. 

It’s been roughly a year and a half since this transaction, and in that time we have seen a lot more tiering in the office market. There was this stressful period where folks just didn’t want exposure to anything office, and then things settled down and people started to realize that not all office is created equal, and not all markets are created equal. 

We’ve seen strength in markets that are doing well, and we’ve seen strength in assets that are doing well. When it comes to single-asset office properties, New York is the biggest market, so there’s a lot more single-asset office to do in New York than in most cities. We’ve seen continued office strength in the CMBS market in New York, particularly in the Class A sector.

When the Rockefeller Center loan matures in 2029, will you be there to refinance it?

I hope so! We all hope so! 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.