i.e. is there any way to get USD from say btc-e to mtgox for less than 1%?
If there was a lower cost to move the funds, there would be less of a price difference between the two and you wouldn't be as interested in doing so.
So essentially, for someone performing arbitrage, the profit is nearly the same regardless of the fee to move fiat funds from one exchange to the other.
[Update: Two services that appear to be under-utilized by arbitrageurs, however, are CurrencyFair and TransferWise.
The way it works is you push funds from your bank to the service, then convert to the other currency, then perform a bank transfer to the destination's bank account. The only mismatch is needs is that the sending account must be your own.
But here's a scenario. Alice has a bank in the UK. Bob, an over-the-counter trader in the U.S. will trade bitcoins with Alice, if she pays in USDs. So Alice sends GBP to CurrencyFair, then converts those funds to dollars. She then does a withdrawal, sending those funds to Bob.
The withdrawal to the U.S. counterparty is done through ACH, so this doesn't work for sending funds to any exchanges as no exchanges presently take deposits via ACH. But for over-the-counter trades, this method becomes quite useful. ]
