Category creation enables incumbents to rejuvenate and rearrange existing market categories, while preserving the social structuration of markets. Previous research has highlighted the importance of consensus building and the claiming of a collective identity among the actors promoting category formation. However, incumbents engage in category creation to reposition themselves in the market hierarchy and to further their strategic interests. As a result, they face conflicting pressures between seeking consensus with their historical rivals, who also engage in category creation, and claiming their distinctiveness to gain a competitive advantage. Through a qualitative study of the creation of the ‘beyond banking’ category in Europe by incumbent banks, we examine the claiming practices used by competing incumbents to simultaneously promote category creation and shape the nascent categories around their strategic interests. We synthetize our findings into an integrated theoretical framework that contributes to research category formation and categorization discourse.