In this paper, we focus on the use of the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) technique in the signature verification area. The DTW-algorithm originates from the field of speech recognition, where it is a highly appreciated component of speaker specific isolated word recognisers. A few years ago the DTW-algorithm has been successfully introduced in the area of on-line signature verification. The characteristics of speech recognition and signature verification are however rather different. Starting from these dissimilarities, our objective is to extract an alternative DTW-approach that is better suited to the signature verification problem.