In a career where millions can be lost or gained in an instant, and the boundaries between the personal and professional have evaporated, there’s no room for mercy.
BBC series Industry is back for a fourth season with a fresh batch of scandals plaguing the world of high finance in Britain’s cutthroat capital.
The brutal drama has shown us that high-stakes banking is not for the weak-hearted, and over the course of four seasons, we’ve seen it all.
Mental health breakdowns, stomach-turning misogyny, copious amounts of drug use (an understatement), a toxic hierarchy running amok with no consequence, and shocking financial deals forged in blood and tears only scrape the surface.
Or as the official BBC synopsis charitably puts it: ‘Everyone is collateral. The boundaries between colleague, lover and enemy blur in the backstabbing, high-pressure, glamorous world of high finance.’
But for those who have an insight into the reality, how close does it hit home?
‘I have a good friend who watched [Industry]. She said it was very triggering, because it was very real to her,’ finance worker Maia* tells Metro about why she has hesitated tuning into 2026’s must-watch returning show.
After working at a big American firm in London for eight years as an investment banker, with friends across departments (including the notorious trading floor), she’s seen and heard her fair share of wild stories.
By the time Maia had started her career, the firm had already rolled back on the annual ski trip, which she had anecdotally heard was ‘so wild they just got completely cancelled’.
She’d been told by a colleague on trading that ‘people would make really, really inappropriate jokes about women and doing drugs was very openly discussed’.
What does Metro think of Industry season 4?
TV reporter Charlotte Minter shares her thoughts in her four-star review:
Banking drama Industry is back for its fourth season on the BBC, meaning cortisol levels across the country are ready to be spiked.
However, after Pierpoint’s merger and the main characters’ exits, there’s less focus on the trading and a bigger shift to politics – of business, marriage, and government.
Still, it remains stressful, but in darker, more sinister ways.
As the protagonists’ lives have developed, their problems are grander, and the consequences of their actions are much greater.
I was left gasping at the whiplashing twists the drama brings, and I remain fully immersed in a jargon-filled world that four seasons later, I’m still none the wiser about.
To read more, click here.
Amid her various tales, she recounts one of the junior women on the trading floor ‘was very attractive, and a lot of the guys would make very vile jokes about her in front of everyone.’
Not only that, but much like Yasmin (Marisa Abela) at the start of her time at Pierpoint & Co, she knew ‘they basically treated women like assistants, even though you were as qualified as them to do the job’.
The portrayal of structural misogyny in Industry seems to ring particularly true, unsurprising for a profession populated by ‘big male egos’.
Serena*, who once worked for a London-based trading provider for a couple of years and had heaps of social and professional overlap with the trading floor in her role, echoed a similar experience.
Just as we see a Christmas party go off the rails in season one of Industry, it’s not a far cry from what has historically gone on at real-life festive dos.
‘At one Christmas party, I barely knew anyone because I was quite new,’ Serena recalls.
‘At some point, a guy that I’ve never met before just lifted me and started carrying me around as if I was a piece of ham, slapping me on my bum and things like that.
‘I was screaming and then eventually he put me down. That wasn’t an HR situation, that was just banter.’
She adds: ‘In another situation, we discovered that pictures were circulating of a colleague against her will among groups of men with a certain style of commentary.’
In yet another, one woman ‘eventually got pushed out because the environment was just so hard and just so horrible that she couldn’t do it anymore’.
Still, it sounds as though for many people on the inside looking out, the toxic atmosphere that manifests in these work environments has been heavily normalised.
Despite the ‘checks and balances’ in place to prevent ‘trades above a certain amount’, Maia is clear when she says: ‘People who lose big money, they get fired in a day or two. There is no remorse about these things.’
That’s just one stressful situation that Myha’la’s character, Harper Stern, as well as various other characters, have to reckon with on the show.
Then there’s just the general bad behaviour, with emotions often heightened in the trading division because the work has such high stakes and is based on individual responsibility.
‘I’ve seen people kick a chest of drawers and walk out or swear at other people,’ Maia says.
Serena has no qualms stating that ‘cocaine is prevalent’ on the trading floor (although heroin is more out of left field on the show), and the drinking culture was so pressurised that at one point, she found herself ‘drinking four working days a week’.
When it comes to mental health – a storyline that cut deep with Nabhaan Rizwan’s character Hari, who dies from a fatal heart attack at work – Maia blankly states it might as well not exist.
She shares: ‘Every day of my first three years, people would just go to the bathroom and cry. I would cry at least once a week, if not more.
‘When I had so much work and I wanted to cry, I would just cry at my desk, and everyone would be totally fine with that. They’d just be like: “Yeah, she’s crying.”
‘We had a cry circle. You would nap in the bathroom, because you couldn’t necessarily get home in time. In the ladies’ bathroom at all times, there would be two or three people napping, three people crying, and three people comforting them. That’s apparently not normal for a workplace.’
As for whether senior figures ever get reprimanded for poor conduct, Maia says: ‘There was a senior who bullied this associate really badly; she filed a complaint, and they moved her to a different team. He kept his job and faced no consequences.
‘The view is, if you do your job well at a senior level – you bring in lots of clients or money – then you get away with everything.’
The class struggles that Rob faces also resonated with Serena, who ‘understood his need to fit in’, adding: ‘My ex was from the Midlands, but he made sure to pretty much scrub his accent as much as he could and sound quite posh.’
The affairs? Both give a resounding yes when asked if there really are that many sex and relationship scandals.
‘Every year there’s an intake of graduates – a bit like you see in the show – that’s just definitely gonna end up being a disaster.
‘There were loads of people who were married that had affairs, ended up divorced, and rumours of incoming divorces – including my ex. He slept with the secretary,’ Serena wryly adds.
The bad reputation that the financial world has accumulated over the years has forced a reckoning for the better, in some cases.
Serena acknowledges that her experiences were a decade ago, and, ostensibly, it seems as though the atmosphere has changed since then.
Although she quips that could just be down to ‘the cagey NDAs’ people are made to sign upon leaving.
She also points out that companies like Bloomberg have scaled back on their big blowout Christmas parties (the firm once held an infamous £1m ‘seven deadly sins’ themed-do in 2000) and swapped them out for more family-friendly affairs.
‘It’s much more appetising, from a PR perspective, to push out pictures of cute kids having a great day with their parents and their colleagues, rather than people doing coke with a Christmas hat on,’ she notes.
On a more positive note, Maia observes: ‘Definitely over the eight years that I was [there] it almost came to a stage where – because of the bad press around the culture in banking – it was almost completely the opposite.
‘They tried really hard to promote women and hire more women. They’re encouraged to stay a long time and improve the gender balance.’
Of course, it also has to be said that in order to keep viewers gripped, the show does seem to take liberties with the accelerated timeline.
Serena reflects: ‘On the TV show, the scandals happen one after another.
‘[In real life] the same amount of stuff may happen over three years, but there are weeks and days of just grabbing coffee with your colleagues and having a fairly normal life in between.’
*Names have been changed to maintain anonymity.
Industry is available to stream on BBC iPlayer now. New episodes are airing every Monday at 10:40pm on BBC One.
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