Chicago – Bank of Montreal (BMO) Harris Bank has decided to acquire General Electric Capital Corporation transportation finance business in the United States, in an $8.7 billion deal scheduled to close late this year.
General Electric Capital’s transportation bussiness is based in Irving, Texas and is the largest investor for the truck and trailer segment around all North America, providing manufacturers, dealers and end-users of transportation equipment. It operates in 11 locations within the United States and 4 in Canada containing in total 600 employees, according to BMO.
General Electric is after the intention of focusing on its industrial bussinesses, which is making large, complicated equipments, and reducing its involvements in other bussinesses by selling $200 billion in finance assets, as told by MarketWatch.
Earlier this year, the company said it would sell most of GE Capital’s assets and also $26.5 billion in real state assets. Also in August, was announced it would sell its health care lending unit to Capital One for $9 billion. For BMO the deal represents a unique opportunity to expand its commercial customer base.
“We’re acquiring an excellent organization, one that is operated by the premier management team in the transportation finance industry,” said David Casper, chief executive of BMO Harris Bank.
GE is looking for buyers with knowledge and experience in managing retirement plan assets, scale, and broad distribution capabilities to support the continued growth of the third-party client.
“With the sale of our Transportation Finance business to BMO, we have again found a buyer with a customer-centric culture who is committed to the industry and growing this business with the help of our tenured and experienced team […] We continue to execute on our asset sales to reduce our ending net investment by US$100 billion by the end of 2015” added sKeith Sherin, GE Capital chairman and CEO.
Source: General Electric