Recently, biometrics such as a person's fingerprint, face, and voice has come to be used for personal authentication. At present, most biometrics authentication systems depend on verification (one-to-one matching) because such verification takes a short period of time and is expected to provide a quick response. In these systems, however, every single user has to enter an ID number for each authentication session and might feel incovenienced as a result. To improve the operation efficiency, identification (one-to-many matching) is required, but identification is currently assumed to require much more time than verification (i.e., the response time is not practical). After probing these problems, we developed a new method to achieve identification in a short period of time. This method shortens the response time by using a matching score matrix, which is constructed in the enrollment phase. The proposed method is shown to need only about 45 one-to-one matchings to identify data in a database with two thousand fingerprints, a count much less than by conventional methods.