GE chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt made the following statement with regard to the IPO of its North American retail finance business, Synchrony Financial:

“Today, we successfully executed the IPO of our North American Retail Finance business, Synchrony Financial. This is an exciting time for the Synchrony Financial team, and we are proud to be SYF shareholders.
“The Synchrony offering is an important first step in our planned, staged exit from the business. We continue to target completing our exit in late 2015 through a capital-efficient split-off transaction. This is a good transaction for GE shareholders.

“The IPO also furthers our goal to position GE Capital as a smaller, safer specialty finance leader, and achieve 75% of our earnings from our Industrial businesses by 2016. With a strong, competitively advantaged set of Industrial businesses and a valuable, commercially focused financial services business, we believe our portfolio will deliver valuable growth for shareholders for years to come.”

In a related story, Bloomberg said Synchrony sold 125 million shares @ $23 each raising $2.88 billion in the largest U.S. initial offering this year. The company began trading on the NYSE under the symbol SYF.