[2][3][4][5][6] The history of Arvato goes back to the printing and industry services division of Bertelsmann; the current name was introduced in 1999.
[13] In 1959, the Kommissionshaus Buch und Ton was established to make the production and service infrastructure available for other publishing and printing companies.
[14] A punch-card index at the Lesering headquarters was acquired from Lufthansa, which later became the basis for the information technology expertise of Arvato.
[14] In the 1970s and 1980s, Bertelsmann founded and bought several other printing and logistics companies in France, Great Britain, Spain, and other European countries.
[25] Additionally, the company became responsible for customer support for the launch of Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
[33] Under the leadership of Gunter Thielen, who became CEO of Bertelsmann in 2002, the LP and CD pressing plants of Sonopress and the encyclopedia publishers were integrated with Arvato, too.
[35] Arvato restructured its business into divisions for printing, distribution, and logistics services, as well as storage media and information technology.
[34] Due to lower volumes of newspapers, magazines, and catalogs, Arvato, Axel Springer, and Gruner + Jahr founded a joint venture for parts of their printing business; it was named Prinovis.
[40] One of the first clients was the district of East Riding of Yorkshire where Arvato managed local taxes and welfare payments, for example.
[43] Especially in Germany, Arvato won more clients for this division, including publishing houses as well as companies in the high-tech and information technology industry.
[34] At the turn of 2007/2008, Hartmut Ostrowski succeeded Gunter Thielen as CEO of Bertelsmann,[44] so Rolf Buch moved to the helm of Arvato.
[46][47] While Ostrowski focused on international expansion, Buch strengthened Arvato's presence in its home market Germany.
[51] Arvato increased its focus on high-tech, information technology, and e-commerce services, three rapidly growing markets, while printing stagnated.
[67][68] Based on sales of 4.8 billion euros in the fiscal year 2015, Arvato was the second-largest division of Bertelsmann after RTL Group.
[79] Arvato provides services needed after the sale of third-party products to end users, such as the repair and preparation of devices.
[92] Arvato's financial solutions[buzzword] include payment processing, factoring, and debt collection services.
[111] Although the company hardly knew more than the name and address of the consumer and had no other adverse information, it gave a low score based on socio-demographic characteristics.
[112] In 2013, another public broadcaster, WDR, made similar allegations: The television magazine Markt checked the credit reports of 80 test consumers.
2015, the NDR criticized the self-service website for tenant self-disclosures showed sensitive personal information of one entered the name, address, and date of birth.
[117] 2016, SWR, another public broadcaster, reported that Arvato Infoscore handles the collection of penalty fares for Deutsche Bahn.
[118] The SWR also provided evidence that Arvato Infoscore had used information from such penalty fares for credit ratings of some customers, too.
[119] In December 2016, SZ-Magazin reported that Arvato employees in the company's Berlin office sustained psychological trauma, including posttraumatic stress disorder, as a result of exposure to videos of torture, murder, bestiality, and child pornography they were required to evaluate as content moderators for Facebook.
[125] Inspectors from the Landesamt für Arbeitsschutz, Gesundheitsschutz und technische Sicherheit [de] Berlin (LAGetSi), the city's occupational safety and health department, visited the office in February 2017, but the inspection did not result in formal action.