NYSE Group Inc. announced that it has received the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval for exemptive relief, permitting NYSE members and member organizations to trade certain unlisted debt securities on the exchange.

Under the relief, the NYSE will be able to trade the corporate debt issues of all NYSE-listed equity issuers and their wholly-owned subsidiaries, allowing NYSE customers to access nearly 6,000 additional bonds compared to approximately 1,000 today.

“The NYSE Group is very pleased with the SEC’s approval of this exemption,” said John Thain, NYSE Group CEO. “By adding a substantial number of fixed income issues to our current inventory, we can now offer our customers and investors in the fixed income marketplace the NYSE’s unique transparency and cost effective trading in the debt related securities of many of the great companies listed on the NYSE. This represents a major step in our goal of creating the world’s leading multi-asset class marketplace offering the broadest array of products and services under one umbrella.”

Pending SEC approval of a separate rule filing, the NYSE Group plans to launch its newly-developed fixed income trading platform, NYSE Bonds. Utilizing the design of NYSE Arca’s all-electronic trading platform, the exchange says that NYSE Bonds will provide investors with increased transparency, and highly efficient and cost effective automatic order executions for corporate debt issues trading on the exchange. Primarily serving retail trading in corporate bonds, NYSE Bonds maintains and matches orders on a strict price and time priority basis and reports quotations and trade prices on an absolute real-time basis.