As of August, would-be Lawrence community bank Veritas Bank seemed tantalizingly close to getting the $10 million to $12 million it needed to open its doors. At that point, the bank-in-organization had $8 million in its coffers.

Then September hit, and brought a wave of business failures and a stock market rollercoaster. Nervous investors started pulling out, about $2 million seeped away, and it looked like Veritas’ opening – already deferred several times – was as far away as ever.

But at the close of 2008, bank President Pedro Arce got a call from an investor willing to buy up 51 percent of the bank’s stocks, putting up $7.5 million – well above the bank’s required capital level.

That investor is Dan Thibeault, president and founder of Graduate Leverage, a Waltham-based student lender that opened its own doors in 2003. Thibeault said he was attracted to Veritas’ commitment to keeping a minority-owned bank rooted in the Lawrence community, which only has large national banks to serve its residents.

The bank’s mission is appealing, he said, but investing in Veritas is also a good business move.

A Young Partnership

Thibeault’s own company can benefit from its connections to Veritas, because Graduate Leverage often refers students to other lenders: “If we’re going to refer business away, why not refer them to a bank we know?”

Besides, most of those students are going to need mortgages and other loans after they graduate, anyway – and Graduate Leverage would be able to refer them, again, to Veritas.

Much of the student lending industry has been hit hard by the sunken economy and credit crunch, with the shutdown of the securitization market cutting off capital access for lenders, Thibeault said. Still, Graduate Leverage has weathered the storm relatively well because about two-thirds of its business goes to students in the medical professions, which have a lower rate of default.

The other third of loans go to minority students, he said: like Veritas, Graduate Leverage’s aim is to provide a service to an underserved group, and Thibeault points to his own company’s success in this area to show that the idea is a good one.

Speaking more broadly, he said, now is also a great time to open a bank: Interest margins have increased, and wide margins mean new banks can do more with less start-up capital. New banks also have a clean slate, with no harmful assets on the books. Finally, upheaval in the industry has left many depositors looking to switch banks, for the first time in years – an ideal time to snag larger numbers of dissatisfied customers.

A Division of Banks spokesman said Veritas still has to get FDIC insurance by the end of April, and Arce said he hopes to get the bank’s doors open around that time – it just depends on when they can get those final approvals.

“In this economic era that we’re in, we don’t know [when we’ll get approval]. The regulators have other fish to fry,” Arce said.

Arce said Veritas has about 200 other, smaller investors contributing, and had heard from other large would-be investors before Thibeault came along. But those other suitors usually wanted to make major changes to Veritas’ plans.

The idea behind Veritas is to provide the kind of education and community presence that Lawrence just doesn’t have, Arce said, and that insistence that the bank do things its own way sent a number of investors away. Thibeault, by contrast, is willing to let the bank follow its original vision.

“We were relieved and surprised,” Arce said. “There’s always someone available to invest capital, but they’re not always the right fit.”