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Royal London full-year operating profit rises 12 percent

(Reuters) - Royal London, Britain's largest mutually owned life, pensions and investment company, said its full-year EEV operating pretax profit rose 12 percent, boosted by robust new business, particularly in its intermediary pensions and wealth businesses.

EEV, or European Embedded Value, is a metric that compares European insurance companies' results and provides a longer-term measure of value generated.

The group, which employs 2,829 people and has around 5.3 million policy holders, said members who hold workplace pension products would benefit from lower prices due to a cap on prices announced by the British government last year.

Britain's financial regulator last month said firms providing workplace pension schemes used by employers for automatic enrolment would have to cap charges within default funds to 0.75 percent per year of funds under management.

The new pension reforms come into force on April 6.

Royal London said its new life and pensions business for the year ended Dec. 31 increased 39 percent to 4.8 billion pounds.

(Reporting by Aashika Jain in Bengaluru; Editing by Anupama Dwivedi)