Recent advances in language modeling have led to a growing number of papers related to finance in top-tier Natural Language Processing (NLP) venues. To systematically examine this trend, we review 374 NLP research papers published between 2017 and 2024 across 38 conferences and workshops, with a focused analysis of 221 papers that directly address finance-related tasks. We evaluate these papers across 11 quantitative and qualitative dimensions, and our study identifies the following opportunities for NLP researchers: (i) expanding the scope of forecasting tasks; (ii) enriching evaluation with financial metrics; (iii) leveraging multilingual and crisis-period datasets; and (iv) balancing PLMs with efficient or interpretable alternatives. We identify actionable directions supported by dataset and tool recommendations, with implications for both the academia and industry communities.