HBO’s hit financial thriller “Industry” has delivered one of its most compelling storylines yet this season: a hunt to expose a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.
The show follows Harper Stern, who’s leading her newly launched investment firm and looking for a company to short — essentially, betting that its stock will crash. After a journalist tips her off that something’s wrong with Tender, she sends her associates, Sweetpea and Kwabena, to Ghana to investigate.
What they discover is damning. “Fake users drive fake revenue drives fake cash,” Sweetpea tells Harper. The entire company appears to be built on fabricated numbers. “The thing is nothing.”
What’s fascinating about this season of “Industry” is how well it speaks to this moment. Tender starts as a payment processing platform for adult content. The show references the very real (and still controversial) Online Safety Bill that the UK introduced, which has led to age verification and other enhanced rules for consuming adult content online. Because of its affiliation with adult content, Tender finds itself at odds with the new government’s regulation and must pivot or die, as the saying goes.
Image Credits:HBO
Its CFO-turned-leader, Whitney, wants the company to pivot into a bank and has a plan to make that happen, including making Tender’s CEO, Henry, the face of that transformation. Whitney is the embodiment of every tech baron cliche. Move fast, break things. Win at all costs. He’s lobbying politicians for a banking license and hunting for merger opportunities.
Harper, meanwhile, is leading her newly launched firm after feeling undermined at her previous firm and being called a DEI plant by the man who hired her (a nod to the decline of DEI in the past few years). She has teamed up with new friends and old frenemies and is looking for blood — meaning a company on the precipice of crashing. To her, Tender is that company.
This puts her at odds with her friend Yasmin, who is married to Henry and is crafting communication and lobbying strategies for Tender. It’s pride and prejudice — the sugar and spice that help make the world go round.
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