$7 billion bucks, not bad

I was talking to Capital One's Bill Polk today about some deals Capital One has closed on—stay tuned for stories on those later this week—and we started talking about the larger deals that happened in 2012.

This was a topic of conversation at the Barnes Buchanan Conference 2013, which took place last week Feb. 7-10, at the Breakers in Palm Beach. I normally go there directly from TechSec, which was Feb. 5&6 in Fort Lauderdale, but I had to miss it this year. I was sorry to miss the conference of course, but a BFF's milestone birthday party in Cincinnati won out.  More on TechSec and Barnes also this week.

So Polk was saying that the larger deals this year, such as Vivint and Securitas Direct, ADT (there were like five of them) totalled up, brought $7 billion dollars into the security industry in 2012. "We've never seen $7 billion come into the industry over a 12-month period before," Polk said.

"What's going on here? The story is that the size and growth in this industry has reached the point where sophisticated capital structured [deals] are finding their way to the top of the house," Polk said.

He said the Interface Security deal was particularly interesting. (Capital One worked with Imperial Capital on that deal.) As Imperial Capital's John Mack pointed out when I reported that story a couple of weeks ago, Polk said, "Normally the bond market likes much larger deals, but the Interface deal was oversubscribed [because they liked the company.]"

Now, bond market deals are not for everyone in the security industry. Not even close.

The "traditional lender, such as Capital One,will continue to play a really important role," Polk said. Instead, the past year's bond market deals signify that the security industry is maturing.

MIlestones all around.