Purpose The credit card business has been one of the key businesses for banks in Taiwan. The purpose of this paper is to use competitive dynamics and structured context analysis (SCA) to explore the competition relationships among market, resources, and strategies concerning the credit card issued banks in Taiwan. Design/methodology/approach The market commonality and resource similarity analysis of competitive dynamics in the first stage obtained the competitive mapping of four major credit card issue banks, as well as the differences of competition strategy. In the second stage, 1,968 pieces of data on credit card news from 2013 to 2014 were collected. SCA was used to analyze the competitive action, competitive response, number of responses, response lag, and response order. Findings The competitor mapping and four hypothesis obtained from competitive dynamics correspond to the credit card competition strategy, as obtained from SCA. Originality/value This research combined competitive dynamics and SCA to analyze the credit cards market in Taiwan. The research model could be used in the other financial market.