‘Industry’ season 4 deals with more technical fraud than any TV show right now

HBO’s financial thriller “Industry” has delivered one of its most compelling storylines this season: the hunt to expose a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.

The show follows Harper Stern, who is leading her newly founded brokerage firm and is looking to keep the company short – essentially, betting that its stock will go bust. When a reporter tells him that there is a problem with Tender, he sends his friends, Sweetpea and Kwabena, to Ghana to investigate.

What they find is terrifying. “Fake users run fake money and run fake money,” Sweetpea told Harper. The entire company seems to be built on manufactured numbers. “It’s nothing.”

What’s interesting about the “Industry” season is how it speaks so far. Tenders started as a way to pay for things for elders. The show points to the facts (and contradictions) Internet Security Bill which the UK has introduced, which has led to age verification and other additional laws for adults to use the Internet. Because of their alliance with the bigwigs, the Tenders find themselves at odds with the new government’s laws and must move or die, as they say.

Its CFO, Whitney, wants the company to start banking and has a plan to make this happen, including making the CEO of Tender, Henry, the face of this change. Whitney is the epitome of every professional cliche. Move fast, smash things. Win at any cost. He urges politicians to get a banking license and look for merger opportunities.

Harper, meanwhile, is leading a company he just started after hearing that he was scorned at his previous company and called a DEI plant by the man who hired him (shaking DEI’s decline in the past few years). He’s teamed up with new friends and old lovers and is out for blood – meaning the company on the horizon has fallen. For him, Tender is the company.

This puts him at loggerheads with his friend Yasmin, who is married to Henry and is developing communication and persuasion strategies to get tenders. It’s pride and prejudice – sugar and spice that make the world go round.

The show nails the tech world with such precision that reality starts to feel like a mockery. Even TechCrunch is name-checked as part of Tender’s playbook.

There is a satirical commentary through the character Moritz, who opposes Western liberalism and hesitates to sell his family bank to Whitney, whose name is Halberstram’s Judaism. The character is probably shaky to the rising criticism of “technofacism”. of other tech barons.

Harper, meanwhile, is still a calculating sociopath. “My real passion lies in finding dead people walking,” he said at an investor’s breakfast. He ends up raising millions for his new company.

He is the person whose presence makes people believe in them. According to his personality, he must calculate carefully; unlike Yasmin and Henry, they have no recourse if they fail. But would the UK establishment, which is so popular, isolated, and white, allow an African American woman to climb into their ranks and beat them at their own game?

“Who needs reality when you’re a great person,” a British entrepreneur told me.

He said the show clearly shows how the UK’s upper class is trusted and is one of the few shows he sees that “shows the tyranny of the British authorities, especially how they control the media and the government to achieve their interests.”

“Nepotism and lack of boundaries in the workplace, people sleeping together for trade secrets, are true and common, unfortunately,” added the European investor.

Meanwhile, Yasmin is heading down a dark path. Earlier this season, she formed a ménage à trois between her husband, Henry, and Whitney’s assistant, Hayley. As the season progresses, his character becomes so interesting that one reviewer has already compared him Ghislaine Maxwell – perhaps the best indicator of what lies in the pits of money and power, is the role of some women in digging those pits.

An Icarus moment may be on the way, however, at least for Whitney.

By now, listeners know how real-world startups sometimes use tricks to increase success (eg Charlie Javice’s Frank) and is said to rob investors and people (FTX crypto crash). There are many such scandalous cases, and some are even mentioned in the show. But perhaps Tender’s real-world parallels may be the last implosion of German fintech Wirecard a few years ago.

Wirecard admitted that billions of the money said that it may not have happened, although the company previously said that two banks in the Philippines are holding the money. It was a matter of complicated accounting and regulatory areas – similar to the financial fraud shown in Tender. Short sellers followed by Wirecardtoo, and one blog called it “some whistleblowers” — people who intervene when “the market, and the ruler, refuse to see what is right in front of them.”

The philosophy is one that one can see Harper embracing soon, especially when Eric tells him at one point that “brief work is dirty, hard, investigative,” and that it’s “anti-establishment, anti-establishment, anti-power.”

With Wirecard, many people, including CEO, was arrestedwhile the COO he went to run away (and he was also accused of being a Russian spy). The fate of the Tenders is not determined until the last few rounds are completed. One of the best things about “Industry” is that it moves fast and breaks things. It is so clear in our time and so bold that the audience is forced to choose their favorite antagonists and take them along for the ride.

It’s fast, fun; a manifestation of the lack of well-known capitalists. And yet, just like in real life, we can never get enough.