For decades, General Electric was happy to reap the enormous profits that arose from its finance arm as it swelled into one of the country’s biggest lenders.

But as banking has become a less profitable and riskier business, GE will complete a transformation it began amid the tumult of the financial crisis: selling off most of that division over the next two years.

Beginning by selling $26.5 billion worth of real estate assets, 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’ worth of assets.

The move announced Friday reflects the shifting landscape of the financial world, especially for the largest players. They face greater regulatory scrutiny and calls from analysts and investors to slim their operations or break up. Some are shifting their focus to areas like wealth management as traditional activities like trading prove less profitable. It is no surprise that GE decided to re-evaluate its role in this ecosystem.

The divestiture campaign, code-named Hubble within GE and put together in about six weeks, will erase one of the main legacies of the conglomerate’s vaunted former chief executive, John F. Welch Jr. But it is also a recognition that manufacturing, not finance, represents the company’s future.

“We’re not sentimentalists,” Jeffrey Immelt, the multinational’s current chairman and chief executive, said in an interview.

GE’s expansive campaign will bring other changes as well. In shrinking its far-flung empire, the company will also bring back $36 billion in cash that now resides overseas, taking a $6 billion tax hit in the process. And it will also press to relieve itself from the burdens of being considered a too-big-to-fail lender, a status that brings stricter regulatory requirements.

The wide range of asset sales will help finance a huge return of money to shareholders, which GE estimates will eventually reach $90 billion.