The retail checking business ain’t what it used to be.

Despite all the technology, despite all the innovations, fewer — yes, fewer — consumers are switching banks.

Robert Rubin, a managing director at Novantas, where he heads the consultancy’s BankChoice Monitor product, told Bank Innovation this week that Novantas is forecasting that but 8% of consumers will switch banks this year. That rate will be, if anything, flat to 2014 switches, and off historical rates. In 2010, for example, 15% of consumers, or 8 million in total, opted to move banks.

What is fascinating about the switching dynamic is that it has stayed so blah in recent years. Rubin, whose BankChoice Monitor includes deep data on consumer sentiments and practice, maintained that banking has only become “stickier,” not less so. In other words, it has become even more “painful” to switch banks — and that does not bode well for fintech startups broadly.

Even as recently as 2010, online bill pay was the main “sticky” banking feature. Moving all those payee accounts to a new online banking platform just hurt. There have been attempts to eliminate or at least lower that hurdle, mainly by using image capture. Deluxe, for example, launched SwitchAgent, an image captive bank switching application, in 2012. Fiserv essentially has one, too, although it markets the scan-to-pay feature of the product. The result: 8% switches and nothing more.

Rubin points out that even if the actual work involved in switching has modulated on paper, the average consumer’s touch points with a bank have expanded to include robust mobile banking offers, and that has discouraged consumer switches.

I have to be honest: it surprises me. There is still widespread dissatisfaction with banks (Bank of America, cough cough), yet consumers, in a way, have fewer choices. Why fewer? Because it doesn’t matter how many seeming options there are for banking — whether from traditional banks that have healthier balance sheets than in the wake of the credit crisis or from startups that offer more creative offerings — if consumers can’t (or won’t) adopt them.

There’s a sad tinge to all this. Rubin is the person I talked to most about the switching dynamic in the wake of the credit crisis when we launched Bank Innovation to help foster a more wholesome banking industry. Back then he was coding FindABetterBank.com, after all. That the reality for consumers in regards to choice has not just stayed the same, but regressed — well, that just sucks, as they say.