General Electric Co. will sell as much as 20 percent of its North American consumer lending business in an initial public offering in 2014 as Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt shrinks reliance on financial profits.

The proceeds will go to increasing capital at the new company, GE said in a regulatory filing. Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE said it plans to complete its exit from the retail finance business in 2015 with a tax-free distribution of the shares to GE stockholders.

The IPO advances Immelt’s objective of boosting the share of GE’s earnings generated by units making industrial products from jet engines to medical scanners. To accomplish that goal, GE is revisiting the strategy used to divest its insurance unit through five stock offerings over a two-year span beginning in 2004.

A registration statement for the offering will be filed in the first quarter, and the IPO completed “later in 2014,” GE said in the filing, without giving a more-specific timetable. GE Capital, the company’s finance business, is holding an investor meeting today in Norwalk, Connecticut.

The consumer finance business’s products include store credit cards for retailers from Amazon.com Inc. to J.C. Penney Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.