[What Is the Islamic Alternative to Usurious Banks?]

Answer—and success is from Allah: Ribā is a plague, a calamity, and corruption; people have no need of it. “Allah destroys interest and gives increase for charities.” [Al-Baqarah:276]
If it is said: The poor man often needs money—urgently or nearly necessarily—and finds no way to meet his need except by borrowing from usurious banks; thus it appears that there is no dispensing with them.
It is said: That is what a needy poor person—or others—may suppose; but in reality and in the outcome, the needy poor person is harmed by borrowing from the bank with additional harm at repayment, or when repayment is delayed—to the extent that, were the poor person to weigh the benefit of borrowing against the harm of borrowing at the time of repayment, he would find the harm greater. Only, he does not feel the harm until it occurs; when it occurs, he realizes his mistake and regrets having ventured to take the loan.
What encourages the poor and the needy to borrow from usurious banks—despite knowing the severe harm entailed—is that human nature tends to take lightly a deferred harm, and inclines to an immediate desire without paying heed to what will result from it later.
If that is the case, then in reality the poor have no need to borrow from usurious banks. All people of sound intellect recognize and judge that when a “benefit” entails or yields a harm equal to or greater than it, it is no benefit at all.
There is no doubt that all reasonable people find objectionable the conduct of a worker who earns five thousand riyals each day but is obliged to pay a tax of five thousand riyals each day; they would deem him foolish and frivolous, or deficient in intellect—and all the more so if he earns five and must pay ten. All reasonable people would firmly judge that the “benefit” of the five has been entirely nullified.
Ribā is of that kind: even if a poor person supposes there is a benefit for him in a usurious loan, he is mistaken; there is no benefit in it at all—rather, as we have explained, it is harm.
As for the rich, their need for usurious loans is absent, both now and later, since they already have wealth that suffices them. They only enter usurious loans out of excessiveness and greed to multiply their trades, not to meet poverty, lack, or necessity.
From what we have mentioned, it becomes clear that there is absolutely no need for a usurious loan.
Source: Min Thimār al-ʿIlm wa al-Ḥikmah vol.2