In this paper, we investigate a new multimodal biometric approach for personal recognition, based on two different biometrics computed from the same hand image: palmprint and fingerprint surface. The detection of these modalities is conducted with no constraints imposed on the subject. In addition, this approach has the particularity of using a new fusion scheme based on the rank level integration method to consolidate the results obtained from the different biometric instances. Rank level fusion is a relatively new fusion approach. It is not a well-studied research problem, yet it has a high potential for efficient consolidation of multiple unimodal biometric outputs matching. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first application of the rank level fusion to consolidate the rank information produced by the five individual fingerprint surface and the palmprint. The achieved experimental results have shown that the designed system achieves an excellent recognition rate and provides more security than unimodal biometric system.