HBO’s hit financial thriller “Industry” had one of the most gripping storylines so far this season: the busting of a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.
The show follows Harper Stern, who heads a newly formed investment firm and is looking for companies to short sell, essentially betting on stocks to collapse. After being tipped off by a journalist that something is wrong with Tender, she sends her colleagues Sweet Pea and Kwabena to Ghana to investigate.
What they discover is horrifying. “Fake users generate fake revenue, generate fake cash,” Sweet Pea tells Harper. It seems like the entire company is built on fabricated numbers. “It’s nothing like that.”
What’s so great about this season’s “Industry” is how well it speaks to this moment. Tender is starting as a payment processing platform for adult content. The show references the very real (and still controversial) Online Safety Bill that the UK has introduced. The bill led to age verification and other tightened rules for consuming adult content online. Tender’s association with adult content puts it at odds with the new government’s regulations and, as is often said, it must pivot or disappear.
Whitney, the CFO-turned-leader, wants the company to pivot to banking, and has plans to make that happen, including making Tender CEO Henry the face of that transformation. Whitney embodies every technology mogul cliché. Move fast and break things. Win at all costs. He is lobbying politicians for a banking license and exploring merger opportunities.
Meanwhile, Harper is leading a newly started company after falling behind at her previous company and being called a DEI factory by the man who hired her (a nod to the decline of DEI over the past few years). She teams up with new friends and old foes, all out for blood. In other words, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy. For her, Tender is that company.
This puts her at odds with her friend Yasmin, who is married to Henry and is developing communications and lobbying strategies for Tender. It’s Pride and Prejudice, the sugar and spice that helps make the world go round.
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The show captures the world of technology so accurately that reality itself feels like satire. Even TechCrunch is name-checked as part of Tender’s media playbook.
There is commentary on fascism through a character named Moritz, who is active against Western liberalism and is reluctant to sell his family’s bank to Whitney. Whitney’s last name is Halberstram, which sounds Jewish. The character is perhaps a nod to the growing criticism of “technofascism” against some tech tycoons.
Harper, on the other hand, remains a calculating sociopath. “My real passion is finding walking corpses,” she said at an investor breakfast. She ends up raising millions of dollars for her new company.
She is the only character whose credibility is compromised by her presence. Personality-wise, she needs to be shrewd and calculating. Unlike Yasmin and Henry, she has nothing to fall back on if she fails. But will the notoriously closed, exclusive, and white British establishment really promote black American women and allow them to beat them at their own game?
“Who needs realism when she’s such a great character,” one Black British founder told me.
He said the show aptly captured how indifferent the British upper classes were from consequences and was one of the few he had actually seen that “accurately depicts the ruthlessness of the British elite, and in particular how they manipulate the media and government to suit their whims”.
“Nepotism in the workplace, lack of boundaries and people sleeping together for trade secrets is unfortunately very real and common,” added one European investor.
Meanwhile, Yasmin is heading down a dark path. Earlier this season, she organized a Troyes dinner between her husband, Henry, and Whitney’s assistant, Haley. As the season progresses, her behavior becomes so hedonistic that one critic has already likened her to Ghislaine Maxwell. This is perhaps the perfect symbol of what lies beneath the surface of money and power, and the role of some women in digging into it.
But at least for Whitney, an Icarus moment may be on the horizon.
By now, viewers will be familiar with how real-world founders sometimes use deception to overinflate their successes (like Charlie Jarvis’ Frank) or allegedly steal from investors and the general public (FTX cryptocurrency crash). There are many such infamous incidents, some of which are even mentioned in the show. But perhaps the most relevant real-world parallel for Tender is the eventual implosion of German fintech Wirecard a few years ago.
Wirecard acknowledged that the billions of dollars in cash it reported likely did not exist, despite the company’s previous claims that two Philippine banks held the funds. It was a story of complex accounting and legal gray areas, much like the financial fraud portrayed in “Tender.” Short sellers are also going after Wirecard, with one blog calling them “alternative whistleblowers,” people who step in when “markets and regulators won’t see what’s in front of them.”
This philosophy is one that Harper readily accepts, especially after Eric tells her at one point that “part-time work is ugly, hard, and investigative” and that it is “anti-status quo, anti-establishment, anti-authority.”
A number of people were arrested at Wirecard, including the CEO, and the COO went on the run (and was accused of being a Russian spy). Tender’s fate remains unknown until the final few episodes. One of the best things about the “industry” is that it moves fast and disrupts things. The production is clearly set in modern times and is so bold in its demeanor that audiences are forced to choose their favorite antihero and act alongside them.
It’s a rush and a thrill. A visual embodiment of the absence of an ethical capitalist. Yet, just like in real life, we can never have enough.
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