HBO’s hit financial thriller “Industry” has delivered one of its most compelling storylines this season: a hunt to expose a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.
The series follows Harper Stern, who heads up her fledgling investment firm and is short-selling a company – essentially, betting that its stock will crash. After a reporter informs her that something is wrong with Tender, she sends her partners, Sweetpea and Kwabena, to Ghana to investigate.
What they discover is damning. “Fake users drive fake revenue and fake cash,” Sweetpea tells Harper’s. The whole company seems to be based on made up numbers. “The point is nothing.”
What’s exciting about this season of “Industry” is how well it speaks to this moment. The contest starts as a payment processing platform for adult content. The show refers to the very real (and still controversial) Internet Safety Bill introduced by the UK, which led to age verification and other improved rules for consuming adult content online. Because of its association with adult content, Tender is at odds with the new government’s regulation and must rotate or die, as the saying goes.
CFO-turned-leader Whitney wants the company to turn into a bank and has a plan to do just that, including making Tender CEO Henry the face of that transformation. Whitney is the embodiment of every tech mogul cliché. Move fast, break things. Win at any cost. He lobbies politicians for a banking license and looks for merger opportunities.
Harper, meanwhile, leads her new company after feeling undermined at her previous company and being called a DEI factory by the man who hired her (a nod to DEI’s decline in recent years). He’s teamed up with new friends and old enemies and is out for blood – that is, a company on the precipice of destruction. For her, Tender is that company.
This puts her at odds with her friend Yasmin, who is married to Henry and plans communications 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 nails the world of technology with such precision that reality itself begins to look like satire. Even TechCrunch is name-checked as part of Tender’s media book.
There is commentary on fascism through the character Moritz, who lobbies against Western liberalism and is reluctant to sell his family’s bank to Whitney, whose last name is Jewish-sounding Halberstram. The character is perhaps a nod in the growing criticism of “technofascism”. certain technology barons.
Harper, meanwhile, is still a computer sociopath. “My real passion is finding dead people walking,” he tells an investor breakfast. She ends up raising millions for her new company.
He is the only character whose existence strains credibility. In terms of personality, she must be cleverly calculating. Unlike Yasmin and Henry, she has nothing to fall back on if she fails. But would the UK establishment, which is notoriously insular, exclusive and white, really let a black American woman rise into their ranks and beat them at their own game?
“Who needs realism when he’s such a great character,” one black British founder told me.
He said the show aptly captures how detached the UK upper class is from consequences and is actually one of the few shows he’s seen that “accurately portrays the cruelty of the British elite, specifically how the media and governments are bent to suit their whims”.
“Nepotism and the lack of boundaries at work, people sleeping together for trade secrets, is very realistic and common, unfortunately,” added one European investor.
Meanwhile, Jasmine is headed down a dark path. Earlier this season, she arranged a ménage à trois between her husband, Henry, and Whitney’s assistant, Hayley. As the season goes on, her behavior becomes so hedonistic that one critic has already likened her Ghislaine Maxwell — perhaps a perfect emblem of what lies in the pits of money and power, and the role some women play in digging those holes.
However, an Icarus moment could be on the way, at least for Whitney.
By now, the public is familiar with how real-world founders sometimes use deception to exaggerate success (like Charlie Javice’s Frank) and allegedly steal from investors and the public (FTX crypto). There are many such infamous cases, and some are even mentioned in the show. But perhaps the most important real-world parallel for Tender would be the eventual collapse of German fintech Wirecard a few years ago.
Wirecard admitted that the billions in cash reported that it probably never existed, despite the company’s previous claims that two banks in the Philippines held the funds. It was a story of complex accounting and legal gray areas – like the financial fraud depicted in Tender. Retailers went behind Wirecardalso, and a blog compiles them “alternative informants— people who step in when “the market and the regulator refuse to see what’s right in front of them.”
The philosophy is one that one could easily see Harper embracing soon enough, especially since Eric tells her at one point that “small work is ugly, hard, exploratory” and that he’s “anti-status quo, anti-establishment, anti-authority.”
With Wirecard, numerous people, including the managing director, were arrestedwhile the COO he ran away (and he was also accused of being a Russian spy). Tender’s fate remains unrealized until the final episodes. One of the best things about “Industry” is that it moves fast and breaks things. It’s so clearly set in our time and so bold in its approach that the audience is forced to pick their favorite anti-hero and go along for the ride.
It’s a rush, a thrill. the visual embodiment of the absence of ethical capitalists. And yet, just like in real life, we can’t get enough.
