HBO’s hit financial thriller “Industry” delivered one in every of its most compelling storylines yet this season: a hunt to uncover a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.
The show follows Harper Stern, who runs her newly formed investment firm and appears for a corporation to sell – essentially by betting that the stock will crash. After a journalist alerts her that something is fallacious with Tender, she sends her associates Sweetpea and Kwabena to Ghana to research.
What they discover is devastating. “Fake users lead to fake earnings and fake cash,” Sweetpea tells Harper. The entire company appears to be built on made-up numbers. “The thing is nothing.”
What’s fascinating about this season of Industry is how well it speaks to this moment. Tender launches as a payment processing platform for adult content. The show references the very real (and still controversial) Online Security Act This is what the UK introduced, which has led to age verification and other stricter rules around online consumption of adult content. Due to its affiliation with adult content, Tender is at odds with the brand new government’s regulations and must pivot or die, because the saying goes.
Whitney, the previous CFO and later leader, wants the corporate to rework right into a bank and has a plan to attain this. This includes making Tender’s CEO, Henry, the face of this transformation. Whitney is the embodiment of each tech baron cliché. Move fast, break things. Win in any respect costs. He is lobbying politicians for a banking license and is searching for merger opportunities.
Meanwhile, Harper is leading her newly founded company after feeling undermined at her previous company and being called a DEI factory by the person who hired her (a nod to the decline of DEI in recent times). She has teamed up with latest friends and old enemies and is out for blood – and with it for a corporation that’s on the breaking point. For them, Tender is that company.
This brings her into conflict together with her friend Yasmin, who’s married to Henry and develops communication and lobbying strategies for Tender. It’s Pride and Prejudice – the sugar and spice that makes the world go round.
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The show hits the tech world with such accuracy that reality itself looks like satire. Even TechCrunch is name-checked as a part of Tender’s media playbook.
Fascism is commented on by the character Moritz, who lobbies against Western liberalism and hesitates to sell his family’s bank to Whitney, whose last name is Jewish-sounding Halberstram. The character is maybe an allusion to the increasing criticism of “technofacism”. some tech barons.
Harper, alternatively, continues to be a calculating sociopath. “My real passion is finding walking dead men,” she says at an investors’ breakfast. She finally ends up raising thousands and thousands for her latest company.
She is the one character whose existence strains credibility. Personally, she has to calculate correctly; Unlike Yasmin and Henry, she has nothing to fall back on if she fails. But would the British establishment, notoriously insular, exclusionary and white, really allow a black American woman to rise through its ranks and beat them at their very own game?
“Who needs realism when she’s such a great character,” a black British female founder told me.
He said the show aptly captures how detached the British upper classes are from consequences, and is in actual fact one in every of the few shows he has seen that “accurately portrays the ruthlessness of the British elite, particularly how they maneuver the media and governments to their own whims.”
“Nepotism and lack of boundaries in the workplace, people sleeping together over trade secrets are unfortunately very real and widespread,” a European investor added.
Meanwhile, Yasmin goes down a dark path. Earlier this season, she organized a ménage à trois between her husband Henry and Whitney’s assistant Hayley. As the season progresses, her behavior becomes so hedonistic that one reviewer has already compared her to her Ghislaine Maxwell – perhaps an ideal symbol of what lies within the depths of cash and power and the role some women play in digging those holes.
However, a minimum of for Whitney, an Icarus moment could also be in store.
By now, audiences are aware of how real-world founders sometimes use deception to exaggerate success (like Charlie Javice’s Frank) and supposedly steal from investors and the general public (the FTX crypto crash). There are many such infamous cases, and a few are even mentioned within the series. But perhaps essentially the most relevant real-world parallel for Tender can be the last word implosion of German fintech company Wirecard a number of years ago.
Wirecard admitted that the billions were in money It was reported that it probably never existed, although the corporate had previously claimed that two banks within the Philippines held the funds. It was a story of complex accounting and legal gray areas – much like the financial fraud depicted in Tender. Short sellers went after Wirecardtoo, and one blog called them “Alternative whistleblowers“ – people who step in when “the market and the regulator refuse to see what’s right in front of them.”
It’s easy to see that Harper soon embraces this philosophy, especially after Eric tells her at one point that “short-time work is ugly, hard, and investigative” and that it goes “against the status quo, against the establishment, and against power.”
With Wirecard, many people, including the CEO, were arrestedthrough the COO went on the run (And was also accused of being a Russian spy). Tender’s fate stays unknown until the top of the ultimate episodes. One of the perfect elements of “Industry” is that it moves quickly and breaks things. The film is so clearly set in our times and so daring in its approach that the audience is forced to decide on their favorite anti-hero and take part.
It’s a rush, a thrill; the visual embodiment of the absence of ethical capitalists. And yet, similar to in real life, we will not get enough.
