8JUNE 2020IN MYOPINIONBy Ana Chadwick, CFO & COO, GE Capital, Global Legacy SolutionsIt is said that "real work" doesn't begin until the deal is signed and closed. At GE, we're accustomed to complex deal negotiations, intricate, multi-national planning and strategy, and massive-scale mergers and acquisitions. But few could have imagined the enormity of what GE took on when the company announced on April 10, 2015 that it would sell most of its Financial Services assets. To put this in perspective, since that day GE has negotiated and closed more than$200 billion in dispositions, comprising almost 40 transactions taking place across more than 30 countries.Who could have imagined the amount of work or the intensity involved in successfully transitioning and decommissioning all that infrastructure? Certainly, not I, and I'm a 24-year veteran of senior financial roles across many of GE's venerable businesses.Off to a Fast StartAs The New York Times announced at the time, "GE is hastening to return to its roots as one of the mightiest industrial companies in the world, whose operations include jet engines, oil drilling equipment and medical devices. What it will mostly shed is GE Capital, a lender with hundreds of billions of dollars of assets." From Day 1, many transactions involved restructuring and regulatory approvals as GE Capital shed its non-strategic assets. The goal was to streamline GE Capital into just three go-forward businesses that aligned strongly with GE's industrial business units: Energy Financial Services (EFS), Aviation Services (GECAS), and Industrial Finance. Everything else, a highly-valued collection of leasing and financing businesses with variegated global customer bases and marketplaces, had to go.A CFO's Challenge of a LifetimeAna Chadwick
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