MUMBAI: Business for payment companies that operate card acceptance infrastructure at merchant outlets saw almost a 30% jump in transactions after the withdrawal of 500 and 1,000 denomination notes from circulation, but the last weeks of December and early January, with cash creeping back into the system, the rise in cashless transactions is tapering off, industry executives said.“There has been a slowdown in the rate of growth of card based transactions over the last few weeks, but the growth trend still continues to be positive,” said Lokvir Kapoor, CEO of Pine Labs which facilitates installation of payment terminals at merchant outlets. “What we are seeing now is slowdown in the week-by-week growth numbers.”The major reason for the slowdown is that cash is coming back into the system and the Reserve Bank of India printing more 500 denomination notes has increased liquidity.The people using cards for almost every transaction no matter how small in November and early December have now switched over to cash, payment industry executives said.“We have seen that small value payments which were being done through card after demonetisation are shifting back to cash with change against Rs 2,000 not being such a major problem anymore," said Kapoor. “This was something that we had expected will happen and we are confident that the market will continue to grow.”While there has been a decline in small card purchases, another trend is that in smaller towns and cities where card payments jumped significantly post demonetisation, transaction values have shrunk.“In cities anyway card payments were around 40% which increased to almost 80% post demonetisation but in smaller towns and villages the figure was less than 15% which jumped to around 30%, we can see the pressure being created from the remaining 70% that was cash even during those two months,” said Rajeev Aggarwal, chief executive of Innoviti Payment Solutions, which works with 50,000 merchants installing PoS terminals for banks like HDFC Bank, State Bank of India and Axis Bank.