Well I totaly understand why he would do this. I once made an international wire transfer, because there was no other option, and the banks stripped me of 7% of the funds on fees, and completely retarded currency exhange rate.

For this guy, that would be a year of savings, which is not insignificant.

Also banks will not commit to any specific total fee amount. If you read their terms and conditions, they say that money could go via unspecified number of intermediaries, where any one of them can take a part of the money up to 5% each or some such.