FAIRFIELD, CT—Continuing to move quickly toward an exit from the financial services business, GE Capital on Thursday said it would sell its US online deposit platform, along with all deposits of GE Capital Bank, to Goldman Sachs Group. Under this agreement, approximately $8 billion in online deposit accounts and $8 billion in brokered CDs will be transferred to Goldman Sachs Bank. The move follows GE Capital's $9-billion sale of its healthcare finance unit to Capital One earlier this week.

“As we work to reduce the size and complexity of GE Capital, this transaction is another key step,” says Keith Sherin, GE Capital's chairman and CEO. “It advances GE Capital's new strategic direction by facilitating closure of one of our two US bank charters, which we believe will help us become less systemically important.”

The other charter, consumer finance business Synchrony Financial, is to be split off in a share exchange later this year, subject to regulatory approval. GE Capital has already sold or is contract to sell much of its real estate-related businesses, including most recently the healthcare finance platofrm.

For Goldman Sachs, the acquisition “achieves greater funding diversification and strengthens the liquidity profile of GS Bank by providing an additional deposit gathering channel,” says Liz Beshel Robinson, treasurer of Goldman Sachs Group. “The establishment of this channel represents the advancement of a key funding objective for the firm.”

That funding objective is the establishment of an online consumer lending platform, and follows Goldman's hiring this past spring of Harit Talwar, formerly with Discover Financial Services. “Sluggish markets and new regulations have diminished historically profitable areas like trading, forcing Goldman and other Wall Street companies to hunt for new sources of revenue,” the New York Times reported in June.